I used to work in a refinery that was attached to a paper mill. When someone died in the mill, we had to bury a roll of paper - there was no body as such to recover. The usual reason for death in the mill was failure to attach a line to the gantry. To explain: If you did not secure yourself to the scaffolding above the machinery, you could fall off of it and into the machines, or the pulper, or whatever you were working on. It may seem perfectly obvious to you and I that one should take the brief second to click that carabiner onto the steel, but for a surprisingly large number of people, the thought never occurs. Because "I will only be up there for a minute" or ""I can reach it no problem" or any number of other reasons. It's not just OSHA that sets those regs, it's the employers who have to pay out when an employee dies in a preventable accident, and then have to train new workers to that level of expertise. I fully assure you, that if someone you know died in a preventable industrial accident, you'd be clamouring for regs. I've seen the hardest-core non-union people turn on a dime when someone's hand got crushed in a press or someone fell on a slick surface or quite a few other such "accidents". "Someone should have done something to prevent that!!!" is the usual call to arms. Well, someone did do something: we call it OSHA.

Back to the traction control argument.....

Driving a large vehicle with a high center of gravity is more difficult than driving a small vehicle with a low center of gravity (GSA :P). In fact, the act of driving one of these vehicles could be said to be dangerous. In the case of the Ford Explorer and many other less-publicised cases, it was downright dangerous, and the general public said "there ought to be a law". However, rather than require better training or simply restricting the use of the vehicles, the government chose to err on the side of greater good - people can still have them - and instead make them easier to drive by mandating TC. So which slippery slope did you want to go down - the ban or significantly restrict the dangerous vehicles slope, or the mandate safety features slope?

Effectively, enforcement of CDL for driving all vehicles classified as "trucks" (hello PT Cruiser), or pay extra for TC and dumbed-down suspension and live with the restrictions it puts on use of the vehicle (no more srs muddin' in your family hauler).

Regardless of which way you go, you are going down a "slippery slope". Ironically, I could care less either way - I wear a helmet anyway, and I love to do trainings. So I would have my cake both ways. But hundred dollar helmets are far more accessible to the general public than thousand dollar training courses are. In the interest of raising the number of motorcyclists in the US, I'm comfortable with the less-expensive to the rider solution - the $100 helmet.

Rider courses around here don't typically cost anywhere near $1000. In Illinois, they were free. Not everybody clamors for regs after somebody else does something stupid either. That may be how things are done in Germany, but many people in this country prefer considerably less government involvement in their lives. These people tend to be the part of the population who can think for themselves and don't have to believe everything that marketing campaigns tell them.